SUCH is the modest title given to these volumes, accompanied by a preface in the
same spirit; and indeed, throughout the work, there is a careful and an almost over-studious
design of keeping down the biographer, and elevating the subject. The book is an entertaining
one, abounding in anecdote, and for the first time the noble bard is fairly arraigned at the
bar of public opinion. When we say fairly, we would not be understood as
speaking of the impartiality of the advocate, for there is neither vice nor failing which
Mr. Moore does not refer to some extenuating
circumstance, but out of his own mouth, as it were, the character of Lord Byron may now be estimated, and we can now speak of him from “his
own showing.”

It is not our intention to add another to the many dissertations that have been
written on the moral and poetical character of this celebrated man. Well has it been said,

“that all the pious duties which we owe

Our parents, friends, our country, and our God,

The seeds of every virtue here below

From discipline alone, and early culture grow.”

This moral discipline, this early culture, Lord
Byron never knew. His first years were without that firm yet gentle guidance
which might but have restrained his sullen and passionate temper, a temper indulged until it
became his master—and, borrowing a phrase from his classical recollections, he is perpetually
complaining of “eating his own heart.” His warfare was against established
customs and opinions; there was nothing too sacred for the exercise of his sarcasm; morals and
religion, man’s honour, and woman’s delicacy, were perpetually the butt of his wit or his
humour. His splendid talents were prostituted to the worst purposes, and the most demoralizing
opinions were supported by the worst example. If tried by the standard of reason or religion,
his career must be pronounced to have been one reckless profligacy; and the greater his
sins against decency and decorum, the more pointed were his attempts to make decorum and
decency ridiculous.

The “root of the matter was within”—he
hated Religion because she denounced his vices—he was an infidel, but it was the
“unbelief of an evil heart,” not of an inquiring mind. His poetry, with
all its beauty, might well be spared, if we could so remove the mischief it has effected, and
we are now unhappily to lament another offence to morals, by this elaborate exposure of his
most irreligious life. We will not shrink from this avowal of our honest and deliberate
opinion. With all the kindheartedness which Mr. Moore
has brought to his labour, and with all that cunning web of sophistry by which he has sought to
hide Lord Byron’s vices, still the author of Childe Harold’s own handwriting is against him.
Many of his letters are the records of opinions and pursuits derogatory alike to his birth, his
station, and his talents. It is worse than idle—it is wicked to cry “peace where there
is no peace.” The charity for which Mr. Moore contends,
ought never to be employed in making the “worse appear the better.” Our hope
is, that the God whom he denied, and the religion he despised, may have reached his heart
before he exchanged time for eternity. This is our charity, and if our hope were realized, then
would this volume he an offence to his memory, and nothing but a mercenary feeling could have
induced its publication, at least in this shape. Yet out of the jarring elements of which it is
composed, there is much to excite our interest and our admiration. As the poet said of his own
Corsair, “all is not evil”—and after delivering our general opinion, in
which we feel ourselves borne out by the contents of the volume, we will not return to this
part of our subject, but content ourselves with passages which may be extracted without
offence, and commented on without pain.

Respecting the childhood of Lord Byron,
Mr. Moore has been more than sufficiently minute in
his researches. The anecdotes recorded of him during his probation in Scotland, are no
otherwise interesting than as partaking in a degree of that mixture of wilfulness and
generosity which characterised his after-life. The title descended to him

Review.—Moore’s Life of Byron.

147

in his tenth year; and we agree with his biographer in thinking that, had he been left to
struggle on for ten years longer as plain George Byron, he would have been
the better for it. Soon after his arrival from Scotland, he was placed under the care of
Dr. Glennie, a schoolmaster of Dulwich; and from
thence he was removed to Harrow, in his 14th year. Of his studies and employments at a public
school, he has himself afforded some very lively sketches, lie does not represent himself as
having been popular, nor were the friendships he formed there of a very permanent character.

Of that romantic attachment which in his own opinion sank so deep as to give a
colour to his future life, Mr. Moore has given a very
pleasing account. The age of the lady was eighteen, Lord
Byron was two years younger; that he drank deeply of the fascination, there can
be no doubt; but an “idolatrous fancy” had great share in the homage paid to
the divinity—she was the subject of many a poetical dream, and what imagination has thus
sanctified, he believed to have been influential beyond its real power.

At seventeen he entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. His feelings towards his
Alma Mater do not appear to have been very affectionate. There are some of his letters
published about this time also, in which his natural parent is treated with much coarseness.
She was, to be sure, a woman of violent temper, and their disputes attained a height which
could only find an appropriate similitude in the “tempest” and the
“hurricane.”

“It is told as a curious proof of each other’s
violence,” says Mr. Moore, “that
after parting one evening in a tempest of this kind, they were known each to go that night
privately to the apothecary’s, inquiring anxiously whether the other had been to purchase
poison, and cautioning the vender of drugs not to attend to such an application, if
made.”

The idea of printing his poems, is stated to have first occurred to him thus:

“Miss Pigot, who
was not before aware of his turn for versifying, had been reading aloud the poems of
Burns, when young Byron said, that he too was a Poet sometimes, and would write down for her
some verses of his own which he remembered. He then with a pencil wrote three lines,
beginning, ‘In thee I fondly hoped to clasp,’ which were printed
in his first unpublished volume, but are not contained in the editions that followed. He
also repeated to her the verses ‘When in the hall my father’s voice,’ so
remarkable for the anticipations of his future fame, that glimmer through them. From this
moment the desire of appealing in print took entire possession of him, though for the
present his ambition did not extend its views beyond a small volume for private
circulation.”

The notices of Lord Byron at this period are
animated and interesting, but are more so perhaps when read with reference to what he
afterwards became, than as varying (with the exception of his poetry) from the life of any
other man of fashion. He affected an indifference to his volume, which he did not feel—and he
evidently and naturally relished the encomiums which private friendship and professional
criticism bestowed upon his poetry.

We have expressed our intention of abstaining from any further allusion to that
gloomy scepticism which took such early root in the mind of Lord
Byron; but we mention it now, to state that the subject is noticed by Mr. Moore in a very affecting way, honourable alike to his own
principles, and to that friendship for Lord Byron which
refers with a true feeling of sorrow this melancholy temperament to the absence of that
controul which his passions and his pride most required at this period of his life. The passage
is somewhat long, but we will give it, in justice to all parties, entire:

“It is but rarely that infidelity or scepticism finds an
entrance into youthful minds. That readiness to take the future upon trust, which is the
charm of this period of life, would naturally, indeed, make it the season of belief as well
as of hope. There are also then, still fresh in the mind, the impressions of early
religious culture, which, even in those who begin soonest to question their faith, give way
but slowly to the encroachments of doubt, and, in the mean time, extend the benefit of
their moral restraint over a portion of life when it is acknowledged such restraints are
most necessary. If exemption from the checks of religion be, as infidels themselves allow,
a state of freedom from responsibility dangerous at all times, it must be peculiarly so in
that season of temptation, youth, when the passions are sufficiently disposed to usurp a
latitude for themselves, without taking a licence also from infidelity to enlarge their
range. It is, therefore, fortunate that, for the causes just stated, the inroads of
scepticism and disbe-

148

Review.—Moore’s Life of Byron.

lief should be seldom felt in the mind till s
period of life, when the character, already formed, is out of the reach of their disturbing
influence,—when, being the result, however erroneous, of thought and reasoning, they are
likely to partake of the sobriety of the process by which they were acquired, and, being
considered but as matters of pure speculation, to have as little share in determining the
mind towards evil as, too often, the most orthodox creed has, at the same age, in
influencing towards good.

“While, in this manner, the moral qualities of the
unbeliever himself are guarded from some of the mischiefs that might, at an earlier age,
attend such doctrines, the danger also of his communicating the infection to others is, for
reasons of a similar nature, considerably diminished. The same vanity or daring which may
have prompted the youthful sceptic’s opinions, will lead him likewise, it is probable,
rashly and irreverently to avow them, without regard either to the effect of his example on
those around him, or the odium which, by such an avowal, he entails irreparably on himself.
But, at a riper age, these consequences are, in general, more cautiously weighed. The
infidel, if at all considerate of the happiness of others, will naturally pause before he
chases from their hearts a hope of which his own feels the want so desolately. If
reguardful only of himself, he will no less naturally shrink from the promulgation of
opinions which, in no age, have men uttered with impunity. In either case there is a
tolerably good security for his silence,—for, should benevolence not restrain him from
making converts of others, prudence may, at least, prevent him from making a martyr of
himself.

“Unfortunately, Lord
Byron was an exception to the usual course of such lapses. With him, the
canker showed itself ‘in the morn and dew of youth,’ when the effect of
such ‘blastments’ is, for every reason, most fatal,—and, in addition to the
real misfortune of being an unbeliever at any age, he exhibited the rare and melancholy
spectacle of an unbelieving schoolboy. The same prematurity of developement which brought
his passions and genius so early into action, enabled him also to anticipate this worst,
dreariest result of reason; and at the very time of life when a spirit and temperament like
his most required controul, those checks, which religious prepossessions best supply, were
almost wholly wanting.

“We have seen, in those two addresses to the Deity which I
have selected from among his unpublished Poems, and still more strongly in a passage of the
Catalogue of his studies, at what a boyish age the authority of all systems and sects was
avowedly shaken off by his inquiring spirit. Yet, even in these, there is a fervour of
adoration mingled with his defiance of creeds, through which the piety implanted in
his nature (as it is deeply in all poetic natures) unequivocally shows itself; and had he
then fallen within the reach of such guidance and example as would have seconded and
fostered these natural dispositions, the licence of opinion, into which he afterwards broke
loose, might have been averted. His scepticism, if not wholly removed, might have been
softened down into that humble doubt which, so far from being inconsistent with a religious
spirit, is perhaps its best guard against presumption and uncharitableness; and, at all
events, even if his own views of religion had not been brightened or elevated, he would
have learned not wantonly to cloud or disturb those of others. But there was no such
monitor near him. After his departure from Southwell, he had not a single friend or
relative to whom he could look up with respect; but was thrown alone on the world, with his
passion and his pride, to revel in the fatal discovery which he imagined himself to have
made of the nothingness of the future, and the all-paramount claims of the present. By
singular ill-fortune, too, the individual who, among all his college friends, had taken the
strongest hold on his admiration and affection, and whose loss he afterwards lamented with
brotherly tenderness, was to the same extent as himself, if not more strongly, a
sceptic.”

In spite of all this, beautiful as it is in language, we doubt whether Lord Byron had at this time settled principles of any kind; his passions were his masters, he had generous impulses and
benevolent feelings; but of any thing that could regulate or restrain, whether it be called
philosophy or religion, he was destitute. He was the creature “of the minute;” and
any statement of his creed, by himself at least, is no more to be depended on than are those
exaggerated pictures of his vices with which his letters and poems abound. The well-meaning but
injudicious friends who attempted his reformation, he loved to “mystify” and to
confound, and so tenaciously did this spirit cling to him, that when, in Greece, he had those
conversations with Dr. Kennedy on the subject of religion which are announced for
publication, there was hardly a person acquainted with him there who did not insinuate that he
was amusing himself at the doctor’s expence.

So much has been already said on the article in the Edinburgh Review, which
it has been contended awakened the poetical energies of the subject of it, that we will dismiss
it with this observation, that we agree with Mr.

Review.—Moore’s Life of Byron.

149

Moore that it was rather the contemptuous tone in which
it was written, than any mistake in the critic’s estimate of Lord
B.’s poems, that deserves our reprehension; for, as Mr. Moore elegantly says,

“The early verses of Lord
Byron, however distinguished by tenderness and grace, give but little
promise of those dazzling miracles of poesy with which he afterwards enchanted the world;
and, if his youthful verses have now a peculiar charm in our eyes, it is because we read
them as it were by the light of his subsequent glory.”

The article was speedily followed by the satire, a proof at once of his genius and of the ferocious spirit by which it was
influenced; it is evident indeed that the foundation of this poem was laid long before the
appearance of the offensive review. There is scarcely a philippic in that satire which either
his after-position in society, or his own generous nature, did not induce him to retract; he
used his best efforts to suppress what his ill-humour had urged him Jo publish, and there is no
severity that can be pronounced on the recklessness of this attack that can equal the sentence
pronounced on it by himself.

In a state of mind over which Mr. Moore
throws the protecting shield of his generous compassion, and which in his usual elegant
exculpatory style, he refers to the accidental circumstances of a disappointed life, Lord Byron now proceeded on his pilgrimage. His letters during his
absence from England are excellent specimens of epistolary descriptions; they give a very
interesting account of his travels, and are written in an agreeable, lively style, with
scarcely any traces of that moody temper in which he had left his country. His return is
announced in the following characteristic letter:

“To Mr. Henry Drury.

“Volage frigate, off
Ushant, July 17, 1811.

“My dear Drury,—After two years’ absence (on the 2d) and some odd days, I am
approaching your country. The day of our arrival you will see by the outside date of my
letter. At present, we are becalmed comfortably, close to Brest harbour;—I have never been
so near it since I left Duck Puddle.

“We left Malta thirty-four days ago, and have had a
tedious passage of it. You will either see or hear from or of me, soon after the receipt of
this, as I pass through town to repair my irreparable affairs; and thence I want to
go to Notts, and raise rents, and to Lancs, and sell collieries, and back to London, and
pay debts,—for it seems I shall neither have coals or comfort till I go down to Rochdale in
person. I have brought home some marbles for Hobhouse;—for myself, four ancient Athenian skulls, dug out of
Sarcophagi,—a phial of attic hemlock,—four live tortoises,—a greyhound (died on the
passage),—two live Greek servants, one an Athenian, t’other a Yaniote, who can speak
nothing but Romaic and Italian,—and myself, as Moses in
the Vicar of Wakefield says, silly, and I
may say it too, for I have as little cause to boast of my expedition as he had of his to
the fair.

“I wrote to you from the Cyanean Rocks, to tell you I had
swam from Sestos to Abydos—have you received my letter?

“Hodgson, I
suppose, is four deep by this time. What would he have given to have seen, like me, the
real Parnassus, where I robbed the Bishop of Chrissae
of a book of geography;—but this I only call plagiarism, as it was done within an hour’s
ride of Delphi.”

His avowed intention of leaving the “whole Castalian State” was as
speedily abandoned as most of his resolutions. He returned to England with two long poems, the
one a satire, in imitation of Horace; the other, the two first cantos of Childe Harold; the former appears to have been his favourite.

“In tracing the fortunes of men,” says Mr. Moore, “it is not a little curious to observe how
often the course of a whole life has depended on a single step. Had Lord Byron now persisted in his original purpose of giving this poem to the
press, it is more than probable that he would have been lost as a great poet to the
world.”

But we cannot thus track the footsteps of Lord
Byron; the most prominent features of his life are well known to our readers,
for there are few men whose minutest acts have been so blazoned.

His letter to Lord Holland (whom he had
abused in his satire), on presenting him with his new poem of Childe Harold, exhibits much good feeling and candour.

St. James’s-street, March 5, 1812

“My Lord,

“May I request your Lordship to accept a copy of the thing
which accompanies this note? You have already so fully proved the truth of the first line of
Pope’s couplet,

‘Forgiveness to the injured doth belong,’

150

Review.—Moore’s Life of Byron.

that I long for an opportunity to give the lie to the verse that follows.
If I were not perfectly convinced that any thing I may have formerly uttered in the boyish
rashness of my misplaced resentment had made as little impression as it deserved to make, I
should hardly have the confidence—perhaps your Lordship may give it a stronger and more
appropriate appellation—to send you a quarto of the same scribbler. But your Lordship, I am
sorry to observe today, is troubled with the gout: if my book can produce a laugh against
itself or the author, it will be of some service. If it can set you to sleep, the benefit will
be yet greater; and as some facetious personage observed half a century ago, that
‘poetry is a mere drug,’ I offer you mine as an humble assistant to the
‘eau médecinale.’ I trust you
will forgive this and all my other buffooneries, and believe me to be, with great respect, your
Lordship’s obliged and sincere servant, Byron.”

The public adulation which followed this poem did not tend to improve his
character; he was proud and reserved; he had drawn his poetical portrait as that of one of
melancholy and sadness, and he appears to have worn such an appearance in vindication of his
consistency. To those behind the scenes, his manners, on the contrary, are represented as
frank, social, and engaging. There was too much of this masquerading for a strong or honourable
mind to have practised; it was a species of hypocrisy too that flattered his pride, and amused
his vanity. During the three following years, his poetry was poured out in rich profusion of
talent;—but we have no space to particularize.

His marriage and the unfortunate circumstances that succeeded, are treated by
Mr. Moore with great delicacy, and in a way which
scarcely any other pen could have managed so well.

In a letter to Mr. Moore, Lord Byron thus expresses himself on the subject of his
separation, an avowal honourable to his candour and to the character of Lady Byron:

“I must set you right in one point, however; the fault was
not, no, nor even the misfortune in my choice, unless in choosing at all; for I do not
believe, and I must say it in the very dregs of all this bitter business, that there ever
was a better or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more amiable and agreeable being than
Lady B. I never had nor can have any reproach to
make her while with me. Where there is blame it belongs to myself, and if I cannot redeem,
I must bear it.”

A parting word, and we have done. We should deem it little less than blasphemy
to be told, that if Lord Byron had been a better man, he
would have been a worse poet. What he might have been, had he drank of that living fountain
which would have healed his sorrows and purified his intellect, it were now in vain to inquire.
The following thought of a writer less known than he
deserves to be, tells us in language as elegant as the sentiment is just, how a taste for the
beauties of the natural world with which the poetry of Lord Byron is rife,
is quickened, improved, and elevated by religious feeling:

“The sun may beautify the face of nature, the planets may
roll in majestic order through the immensity of space, spring may spread her blossoms,
summer may ripen her fruits, autumn may call to the banquet, the senses are regaled; but in
the heart that is not purified by religious sentiments, there is no perception of spiritual
beauty, no movement of spiritual delight, no reference to that Hand which is scattering
around the means of enjoyment, and the incentives to praise. But let the heart be touched
with that etherial spark which is elicited by the Word of God and the promises of his Son;
let the sinful affections be removed, and the influence of a devout spirit be cherished;
let intellect and reflection became the handmaids of Piety; then
we shall see God in all that is great and beautiful in creation, and feel him in all that
is cheerful and happy in our own minds.”

The volume before us brings the life of Lord
Byron down to the period of his final departure from England. We cannot help
thinking that something too much has been afforded; and we cannot conceal our apprehensions
that, as the poetry of Lord Byron produced a generation of sceptical
misanthropes, so the details of his fashionable excesses may provoke a spirit of imitation in
the thoughtless, the giddy, and the young.

Robert Burns (1759-1796)
Scottish poet and song collector; author of Poems, chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786).

Henry Joseph Thomas Drury (1778-1841)
The eldest son of Joseph Drury, Byron's headmaster; he was fellow of King's College,
Cambridge and assistant-master at Harrow from 1801. In 1808 he married Ann Caroline Tayler,
whose sisters married Drury's friends Robert Bland and Francis Hodgson.

Henry Richard Fox, third baron Holland (1773-1840)
Whig politician and literary patron; Holland House was for many years the meeting place
for reform-minded politicians and writers. He also published translations from the Spanish
and Italian; Memoirs of the Whig Party was published in 1852.

William Glennie (1761-1828)
Originally of Aberdeen; Byron studied at Dr. Glennie's Academy at Dulwich in 1799.

John Cam Hobhouse, baron Broughton (1786-1869)
Founder of the Cambridge Whig Club; traveled with Byron in the orient, radical MP for
Westminster (1820); Byron's executor; after a long career in politics published Some Account of a Long Life (1865) later augmented as Recollections of a Long Life, 6 vols (1909-1911).

Francis Hodgson (1781-1852)
Provost of Eton College, translator of Juvenal (1807) and close friend of Byron. He wrote
for the Monthly and Critical Reviews, and was
author of (among other volumes of poetry) Childe Harold's Monitor; or
Lines occasioned by the last Canto of Childe Harold (1818).

Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
Irish poet and biographer, author of the Irish Melodies (1807-34),
The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and Lalla
Rookh (1817); he was Byron's close friend and designated biographer.

Bridget Elizabeth Pigot (1783-1866)
Byron's early friend who lived with her mother and brothers at Southwell Green where
Byron visited his mother at Burgage Manor.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
English poet and satirist; author of The Rape of the Lock (1714)
and The Dunciad (1728).